Making matches at a factory involves some staggering numbers: two million splints an hour get fed into a perforated steel plate so that they can be ready to get dipped in the red lighter material, 500 boxes of matches get made per minute to house the matches, and 200 matches are processed per second. It’s a doozy. And surprisingly goopy.

I’ve never actually considered how matches were made so it’s sort of neat to see how something so small and fiery gets spat out in such mass quantities.